Monday, May 30, 2011

Sprachen Ze Deutsch?

I am gonig to learn German. Then I am gonig to Germany.


Friday, May 20, 2011

May Guest Posts


The man who forgot, remembered and then dreamed of the secret value of food


And then it happened. I stopped digesting. It was not a physiological problem, I was sure of this, rather, it was most definitely a metaphysical one. I had been on to this for a while. I had been feeling my metabolism slowing down for the past few weeks. And now it was stopped. It was as if my body had finally realized its limits. I knew it had to happen sooner or later. At last I no longer needed food. It was a rash moment of existential angst that I made a promise to myself to spend the rest of my foodless days staggering my way aimlessly through the city. And so I did. I wandered about and for the first few days all I could think of was the amazing futility of my stomach, the mind boggling absurdity of it. I came across a Burger King and saw people eating hamburgers and sipping on their plastic straws, and it seemed completely unnecessary, ridiculous, as if they were eating because they were bored, and it was then that I understood that somebody had lied to me and that food was not a prerequisite for life, that indeed I could carry on years like this stumbling through the city without a bite to eat. To think of all the foreign substances we put into ourselves, things we know not where they come from, lifeless inhuman things that could be hurting us. So I emptied my bank account and rolled through town with money crowding my pockets, buying things here and there until I couldn’t carry anything more, but never buying anything to eat. When I grew hungry I told myself that hunger was an illusion, that it was the devil speaking from the depths of my bowels; in my more rational moments I’d tell myself that it was a mental illness of sorts that my parents and teachers had implanted in me, a collective neurosis, perhaps instigated by the government or capitalism to keep us under a predictable dietary regime or make us buy more. Walking up the streets of Huertas I would pass by restaurants and the smells they exuded made me hungry again. God dammit I thought, could there be a significance to food after all? No, surely not. It made no sense, to put this utterly arbitrary substance into my body and expect that to do something for me. Why sex made sense, sex made babies, I could see the babies with my own eyes, sex had an irrefutable logic to it. But hunger, food, digestion, this was all absurd, surely! Why, all I ever saw food produce was shit, and who needs shit? I was much better off without shit, and so was the rest of the world. Secretly I hoped that I would never have to shit again. I thought of shit as an aberration of sorts, a toxic residue which our body produced to warn us that it was ill, the way pain exists, or the way we sneeze when we are sick, so we shit to purge us of the unnecessary harm that eating inflicts in us. I went a week without eating anything, roaming the city, just looking and walking, just lingering, not doing anything; occasionally I would sit on a bench and question reality, wonder at the children screaming ecstatically in the park and then wonder about my wonder and the wonder of my wonder, and then wonder about wondering about something ad infinitum, and the walking would always seem to open new realities for me; I would be in the Retiro and it would be the most important thing in the world, and then I would walk and it was as if I were slowly exterminating that reality for another infinitely realer one. One day I was strolling along the obscenity that is the Castellana, dragging myself past buildings built for royalty and the aristocracy and here and there one built for the modern business men of Madrid, when I happened to glance to my right and catch my reflection in the tinted window of a sandwich cafĂ©. I was a skeleton, there was no fat in my cheeks, my legs were crookedly bent inwards and my shoulders looked like they were falling off. And then the thought struck me, that missing piece of evidence suddenly made itself known to me, that secret function of food which I had overlooked. All these days my body had been evacuating itself through the meager turds I had been producing on rare occasions. Little by little my body had been disintegrating and there had been nothing to replenish it. And that was when I realized the secret value of food. I understood that in a quite literal sense I was food, that without food I was nothing, that somehow in the hidden magic of my body food became me. I spent the rest of the day eating hamburgers and when I returned home I plopped my bloated, rachitic body on my bed and I don’t know if it was the food but I immediately entered into the most bizarre dream I have ever had. In the dream I was not myself, I was somebody else, an entirely foreign consciousness. I was a French man living in Paris in a luxurious apartment with a view of the tour Eiffel. I was old and obese and I was sitting in an enormous leather couch with a whiskey in my hand, telling a story, looking out the window at the white seagulls dancing against the turquoise sky, and simultaneously wondering why there were seagulls in Paris, so far away from the sea. It was strange because in my dream I was both the old man telling the story and I was the protagonist of his story at the same time. After reflecting on the seagulls I, the old man, began as follows:

Today? The usual. No, I won’t run, I am too old to run. Besides, it’ll be night soon. What will I do then, you ask? Well, I will eat. Why? I will eat because the most important thing in the world is food. More important than love, more important than family or friends or politics or god, more important than anything is food, I know, a trite truth, but precisely because it is so obvious, this truth can be so misleading. Let me tell you about the day I discovered the secret value of food. I was young and it was a dark red day, in which the sun seemed to be in heat and to be indulging in some nasty dark homoerotic activity; the fact is, the day was a lot like hell, and I was in Malawai. In a forest. I was doing development work. I had strayed from the village I was trying to save, hopelessly lost. And there was no food in the forest I was in, no rabbits, no plumb trees, no candy bars, bubble gum or hamburgers, not even snails, not even ants or elephants. No food, period. And I walked and walked and the sun just hovered there burning with lust between the clouds which gathered around it like the dirty fumes of a forbidden passion, dark and red; I could see it blinking through the skinny black trees, the horny bastard. And I walked, and came across, eventually, a black man. I said, “Hello black man”. And he said, “Hello white man”. “Do you have any food,” I asked him. “Hohohoho”, he said, much like our Santa Clause, “Now you see how precious food really is, don’t you? But there is no food here. No food in this forest.” I began to sulk and think about death, and the poetry and sexuality of the sun eluded me. There was just this black man sitting on a rock touching the inner part of his thigh and looking into space. I said, “please, how does one go about surviving here?” He said, “hohoho, wouldn’t you like to know. Now you see the secret value of food”. “Yes, yes, I know, the secret value of food…” “Look at me,” he said, “my ribs are visible, my head is like a sundried prune and my height is severely stunted from malnutrition”. But the black man would not show me the way to survival. I suppose you want to know how I escaped from this precarious situation which was the source of my epiphany concerning the true value of food? I will tell you. I stood there, my hunger burning a hole into my stomach, and suddenly decided to kill this black man and eat him. So I picked up a large, sharp stone and smacked it against his head, killed him, and then I hacked his body into pieces and ate his meat raw, which it turned out was enough to fill me up. It gave me sufficient energy to walk and walk and walk out of that enchanted forest, through a yellow desert and all the way to a random village where I boarded the first bus to Timbuktu. There I phoned my parents and they bought me a ticket from Timbuktu to Paris with layovers in Johanseburg and Munich on Expedia which cost me an exorbitant 2000 Euros. I flew back to my native Paris and have been preaching the true value of food to all my friends ever since. “Ma poulette”, I will tell my girlfriend, “you do not know the secret value of food”, as we are eating at the McDonalds between the Hotel de Ville and the Centre Pompidou ( I have become a rabid admirer of McDonalds). “You see this here hamburger, Marie, you see its dripping juices and the tomato and the lettuce, these are all infinitely more valuable than what you and I share on any platonic level. This coca cola, my chere Marie, contains more truth in its calories than our love will ever contain in its silences or orgasms, why this here Mc nugget is more beautiful to me, its curves conceal more promise, more poetry than your silhouette ever will, these here onion rings…” here Marie stops me and tells me to shut up for once as she looks out the window and perhaps contemplates leaving me. This will not detract me, however, from what I know to be true. 


Then, I, this old fat man, take a sip of my whiskey and say, “Now, if you will excuse me, I think dinner is ready. Marie? Oh Marie? Ma poulette, Dinner time!” and I pick up a little brass bell and ring it, louder and louder, and I ring it so loudly that it wakes me up. I have a throbbing headache and tinnitus ringing in my ear the same timbre as the old man’s bell. My bedroom is filled with dark blue moonlight. I stumble my way into the bathroom and take the biggest shit of my life. Then I go back to bed and I don’t dream again.





Jared


What is the highest form of music? An answer. 



    Backwards fear look forwards sustain and easily simplify a keyhole door. Done awaiting an order that touches on some idea. That a person can be free without turning around, an uncle and a village, until it's you. 
    Does this appear to be some place to lay your hands down; or, are you over there, while we are over here? What style, what grace. When what appears where, then clarity turns you on. 
    I want to tell you something. Interest, the rapture of learning, is accompanied ever only by feeling. But that which makes me unique is as automated as your car is driven. Stupid watchers, closely keeps inside a switch. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out." 
    Happen. Be yourself. Do you look good? Think outside the box. What are you going to be? I think maybe if I write the right books I can radicalize the youth. Now, think outside the box. What is radicalism? What is context? 
    Life is a suitcase in a room that you walk by as a child tugs on your sleeve with open eyes inquiring your soul. What is space flight and aeronautics? Get some fire under your ship. Unless it's a wooden ship, that would be poor judgment. 
    What are generalizations? What is America? What is the American people? I was there, say. Where were you? When? Say again, I was there. Who are you? What are the five "W"'s? 
    My heart is for the hurting. It goes out. Any reluctance on my part may be interpreted as an attempt at talent. He who organizes first is first to have followers. Be careful. 
    Can you calculate risks? Take risks. Think outside the box. Measure twice, cut once. Take calculated risks. Be like me. 
    You could kill me. Speak the magic words. What are the magic words? Don't kill me. Don't stop asking questions. Are you going to kill my curiosity? Ask questions. What's hypocrisy? Who am I to say it's not great? Maybe one day they'll say, 'his genius was true, it wasn't used up as he became older'. 
    He gave and could not take. Learn to take. You must learn to take. We all know that if you don't take, what happens? What's survival? Do you want to survive?
    You're sadistic. Do you know, what is sadism? You're schizophrenic. Think outside the box.
    What is the box? What is a thought? Think outside the box.
    What's defensive? What's death? Don't be defensive. A good offense is as good as a strong defense.
    What is your process of thought? What is the result? Think outside the box. Speak.
    What if you were a teacher? What would you teach your students?
    We all have opportunities. I used to take drugs, but I didn't find confidence. That's a story for another time. It has nothing to do with you. I tell you this so you might benefit from my experience.
    O, it's a car. Did you see that, car? It was very fast, passed me by. O, that's poor tasting. O, that's priceless.
    Become a bourgeois school child, who thinks the only way to have relief is to escape the mind.
From,
Jared


Sunday, May 8, 2011

The Buoy

 "I was late for the first race
But I parked, hustled in, and I could
Feel this beershit really coming on,
You know, not only coming on
But I had to hold the cheeks of my ass
Together while walking real fast from
The parking lot and through admissions
And toward and in the crapper."

Charles Bukowski, "The 9 Horse"

Every time I read these words I weep. Whether it be in solitude amongst my belongings (empty beer cans, a universe of books and a persian rug) or in the library. I simply can't help it. My friend Kevin speaks fondly of beer shits from time to time and I am reminded of Bukowski's fine words. Fine words elegantly and delecately crafted in a cave somewhere--his dimly lit study. A candle and a corona his sole companions.

Anyways, what this is all about is I saw what I definitely determined to be a beer shit on the sidewalk yesterday. While walking to Wegmans to procure a bottle of exquisite belgian ale for my companions and I to enjoy, in my line of vision, not 6 sidewalk squares in front of my moving body lay a wet, brown mass. I moved in for closer inspection. The specimen was definitely of human origin (because of girth, texture, etc.) however, how it got there and why it got there were both a mystery.

I quickly roped off the sidewalk square with toothpicks and floss. I wedged a few toothpicks into the corner of each trench that bespoke the end of one polygon and the beginning of the next. Then wound tightly each pack of flimsy wood, connecting them all in such a manner that it produced what appeared to me to be a miniature boxing ring. What to do now? I wasn't a forensic analyst; I couldn't extract a sample and determine precisely which beer had produced the shit, I couldn't even determine which region the hops or barley had come from. But did I want that? No. I let my instincts take over.
 
I continued, hurriedly, on my path to Wegmans. I gravitated involuntarily to the aisle in which PVC pipe resides. I had never purchased PVC pipe before, and didn't even know Wegmans carried such an item. But still, I drifted up to the shelf with the apparent foreknowledge of a habitual buyer of the item--as if I had done so every day in my life for a time (or a past life perhaps...).
 
I purchased a foot of PVC pipe, a liter of Belgian ale and a six pack of Yuengling. The purchases came to $17.76. Moments before checkout, I noticed a penny laying atop a Twix bar. I stooped and fetched it. I noticed that it had been quite some time since someone had bought a Twix bar in this particular aisle; there was a thin, almost imperciptible film of grey-white dust layering the golden wrapper. I received $2.25 (remember this number) in change by means of the orphan penny. I headed back to the beer shit.
 
I came across the sidewalk square and witheld an utterly un-surprising scene. It was exactly how I left it. I set myself to work. The beer shit was almost directly in the middle of the sidewalk square. I placed the six pack of Yuengling in front of the beer shit (from the Wegmans side), equidistant from the sidewalk trench. Then, I placed the PVC pipe on the other side. Now, the PVC pipe was too long, and would spill over on to the neighboring square. What I did was direct it so that it formed almost a 45 degree angle between the shit and the normal line, facing the road. I stepped back.
 
I stood for quite some time on somebody's lawn in front of the sidewalk square admiring the installation. It was pretty good. I noted that a few passersby were walking up the sidewalk path toward my piece and decided to observe their reactions from behind a nearby bush.
 
A minute later they approached, circled the exhibit, made a few inaudible remarks and continued on their path. I emerged from the flora and stood by the square. I felt satisfied with the contribution I had made to society that day so I decided to go and get a coffee at a local cafe. You guessed it, that large sized coffee came to $2.25. And it was the last bit of money that belonged to me on this Earth. 
 
fin. 

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Encounters


The house at the end of a smokey road begins to exist. Inside on a floor tiled with stains, among a crowd of 60, the discharged army man tells a joke about how he spends his days.

“I shoot them. I shoot 'em all, ya know? Every cow has to die. Every single god damn one. It's tough. What? What's that? No i'm not joking! This is my living we're talking about.”

Eyeball rolls about drunkenly, resting after a long journey on the the pink-haired girl speaking quickly with jumpy movements to a girl group of three.

“Are you listening?”

Legs take me, well, barely, to the girl with pink hair. When I arrive my specially concocted beverage splashes some cold life onto her. The fabric of her dress clings tightly to her skin, and underneath a tattoo of a bird reveals itself.

“What the hell, asshole!”

“Do you want to do this?”

“What?!”

“I said do you want to do this? Come here, walk and talk, get shit splashed on your dress. You know, this.

I—“


My head falls a little bit as I spin around to my next direction, cracking my neck as one of the bands of do-gooders prepares to escort me out of the house.

TEXT MESSAGE robots in disguise!” echoes in my head as my pocket vibrates, and i'm alerted to a message. It's her. That girl with issues and plans to put those issues to work. If I answer this text perhaps our arms will graze one another, perhaps our minds will meet at a point of hedonism-- The crossroad of hedone, where Lucifer and Artemis meet to hunt piglets. The door swings open as the band throws me out, shouting something that was probably meant to deter future scenarios akin to this one.


Outside a man with jeans that are tights, and hair that is wild, is peeing on the building. I try to ascribe some symbolic meaning to that holy orange-yellow descent. He sees my visual trajectory and smiles a slight smile. His blue hands raise into the air and waft my aura over. It happily obliges and it surrounds us both as we stand inspecting each other.

Is it time?”

What do you think you're doing here, man?”

Is it time?”

It isn't in the proper order of things to take a gander at the nuts of other men, ya see?”

It must be time.”

Yeah, are you going to shake it dry or not?”


My visual field dwells on his black shirt. The rest of the world now comes into awareness, and I notice the greenery that is wet and drooping under him, the house with chips of paint surrounding the window sills, the cars encasing the slim walkway in front and behind me. Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel. Only my mind spins. It spins first slowly, then with haste and vigor, then the cars and the house cease to be separate and the sky takes me in, until the stars are spinning and alive with motion just for me.

It's time to live again.”

Go to hell.”


The roaring of the house band begins and his eyes perk up as he zips up and goes in to hear. I have no choice, but to let the heavens envelop my thoughts as I make my way into the past. The past of four hours ago, when I stood on a roof, pacing, trying to decide whether or not I wanted to decline.

I'm a social climber, climbing downwards, and the descent is difficult!.” Those Ferlinghetti words were my words as I screamed to the academics below, my planned castration.

While my mind dances among the meteors and celestial debris, my body repeats those words that allow me to ascend. I'm a social climber, climbing downwards, and the descent is difficult.

EWWWWWW POETRY

Just because you're annoyed, and potentially perturbed
I'll grant you a reprieve from poetry, and leave you less disturbed.

Doesn't poetry suck? Isn't it fuckin dumb?
The sight of fragmented lines leaves me oh so glum.

That's why I wrote this poem--to talk about how shitty a poem is,
To convert you, dear reader, even though it's none of my bizzz

smoker's anthem 2k11
rat poison productions
ass cheek methods; Shwarzbein chronicles
what's goodi inc.,
occupatio you know what it is